Giancarlo Livraghi wrote, [on 6/30/2008 7:41 PM]:
"Bi-lingualism", per se, helps even when it seems that it isn't
"bi-culturalism". The sheer fact of using different languages widens
perspective, even if people aren't aware of it, or it isn't immediately
obvious in their "cultural attitudes".
Something relevant that caught my eye:
http://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2008/06/bilingual-children-european
By rejecting the Lisbon Treaty, Ireland's voters may have thrown the
European Union into crisis, but in a more profound way I am optimistic
about Europe. A while ago, I took the train from Paris to Brussels for a
meeting at the headquarters of the European Commission. The train was
full of people my age - the late thirties - going to Brussels to
participate in various EU projects.
I started chatting with my neighbours. Most of the people I spoke with
came from more than one cultural background, with two or more
nationalities in the family. All of us were at least bilingual, many
trilingual or more. My neighbours epitomised the deep cultural change
now taking place in Europe. A new generation has grown up, of people
born more than a quarter of a century after the end of the Second World
War and now moving around Europe to study and work - meeting, dating,
marrying and having children with people from other European countries
and doing so as a matter of course.
More and more European children are growing up multilingual. They are
unlike immigrants born in one culture and having to grow up in another.
They are unlike children growing up in a monolingual, monocultural
family that happens to be located in a wider multicultural en vironment.
For these children, cultural and linguistic diversity is not just a part
of the society at large, it is a part of themselves, a novel kind of
identity. Multilingualism is becoming an existential condition in
Europe, good news for a continent in which national identities have been
so powerful and have caused so much tragedy and pain in the past.
This condition also affects our cognitive life. Recent research in
developmental psychology shows that bilingual children are quicker to
develop an ability to understand the mental states of others. A likely
interpretation of these findings is that bilingual children have a more
fine-grained ability to understand their social environment and, in
particular, a greater awareness that different people may represent
reality in different ways. My bilingual six-year-old son makes mistakes
in French and Italian but never confuses contexts in which it is more
appropriate to use one language than the other.
I believe that European multilingualism will help produce a new
generation of children whose tolerance of diverse cultures will be built
from within, not learned as a social norm.
All this may be wishful thinking, projecting my own personal trajectory
on the future of Europe. But I can't help thinking that being
multilingual is the best and cheapest antidote to cultural intolerance,
as well as a way of going beyond the empty label of multiculturalism by
experiencing a plural culture from within. And, of course, this is not
just a European issue.
Gloria Origgi is an Italian philosopher based in Paris. Taken from "What
Are You Optimistic About?" (edited by John Brockman, Pocket Books)
--
((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
